Obituary of Paolo Rossi Nuncius 27

Nuncius 27 (2012) 1–10
brill.nl/nun
Obituary
Paolo Rossi
30 December 1923 – 14 January 2012
Ferdinando Abbri
Università di Siena, Italy
[email protected]
Figure 1. Paolo Rossi (left) and the President of the Italian Republic Giorgio
Napolitano in the library of the Museo Galileo on May 12, 2011.
On the 14th of January 2012 Paolo Rossi died in Florence from a grave blood
disease, and with his passing one of the most important voices in Italy in
the history of philosophy and the history of science from the second half of
the twentieth century has been silenced.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012
DOI 10.1163/182539112X636319
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F. Abbri / Nuncius 27 (2012) 1–10
Born in Urbino on 30 December 1923, Rossi attended school in Ancona
and Bologna before transferring to Florence, where he studied under
Eugenio Garin and in 1946 received his university degree in moral philosophy. The fact that he chose as his thesis topic La libertà (1928) by the spiritualist philosopher Piero Martinetti was of great ethical and political
significance because Martinetti was the only Italian philosopher who in
1931 refused to take the oath of loyalty to the fascist regime. After graduating Rossi published other studies on Martinetti, and edited the works of the
nineteenth-century republican philosopher Carlo Cattaneo. He completed
his post-graduate studies in philosophy and accepted a teaching post at a
secondary school in Città di Castello. There he met Andreina Bizzarri, who
became his wife and life-long companion.
In 1948 Rossi moved to Milan when Antonio Banfi, professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Milan, offered him a position as a
teaching assistant. Antonio Banfi and Eugenio Garin were perhaps the
most influential figures in the development of his philosophical thought.
Rossi wrote several essays on Banfi and in 1971 he published a memorial
volume in which he acknowledged his profound debt to this mentor.
For the whole of his life Rossi would also recall with gratitude the enlightened teaching of Garin. Reminiscing just a year before his death, he said
that having been a protégé of this eminent philosopher opened many doors
for him in the community of European philosophers. In 1959 he was granted
a fellowship from the Warburg Institute, and the warm reception that was
accorded him could be attributed to his philosophical ‘heritage’ and to the
high esteem in which his professor was held by the scholars at this prestigious institution. Twenty years ago Rossi declared that he had learned
much from Garin, but one thing stood out in his mind as being particularly
significant – not a philosophy but a methodology, a historical perspective
that he would apply in all of his thinking. Textbooks could convey the
fundamental theorems of philosophy, but these apparently clear and selfevident concepts were actually the outcome of long and complicated processes, and the task of the historian was to reconstruct these processes.
Through historical analysis one could gain an appreciation of the infinite
variety of philosophical thought – the subtle differences in position, the
clash of opposing ideas, and the persistence of traditions – all of which
were necessary to the construction of new ideas.
During his early years in Milan, Rossi worked for the publishing house of
Mondadori. In 1954 he received a teaching appointment in the history of
philosophy at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of
Milan (Università Statale) and the following year he was assigned to teach
F. Abbri / Nuncius 27 (2012) 1–10
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the course in the philosophy of history. In 1961 he was conferred the title of
full professor with tenure in the history of philosophy. He taught at the
University of Cagliari (1961–1962) and the University of Bologna (1962–
1965), before accepting a faculty position at the University of Florence,
where he became professor emeritus and remained until his retirement in
1999.
In 1952 Rossi published Giacomo Aconcio,1 a work on the Italian humanist
and heretic that testified to Rossi’s profound interest in Renaissance Italy
and the humanist movement, in which he was influenced by the studies of
Eugenio Garin on Italian humanism and the work of Delio Cantimori on
the heretical movement in Cinquecento Italy. Fifty years later, in 2003, Rossi
would return to a consideration of Aconcio in an essay on Satanae
Stratagemata (1561) that combined historical research with philosophical
reflections on the theme of religious tolerance, following a methodology
that was uniquely his own. Indeed, as this essay demonstrates, Rossi would
never separate philosophy from its historical and social context, being convinced that the study of history could be integrated with lucid reflections
on the eternal and temporal problems of man, viewed both as an individual
and as a member of society.
In 1957 Rossi published the first edition of what would prove to be one of
his most celebrated and important historiographic works, Francesco Bacone
dalla magia alla scienza.2 The philosophy of Francis Bacon became central
to Rossi and the Italian edition of the Lord Chancellor’s works would
accompany him for his entire life. In Francesco Bacone Rossi demonstrated
the Renaissance roots of Bacon’s thought and the contribution of the art of
rhetoric to the development of his scientific method. Indeed, by analyzing
the nexus between magic, hermeticism and the new humanist philosophy,
Rossi revised the image of Bacon as a positivist thinker, revealing instead
the complex, heterogeneous context out of which modern science was
born. He also provided a fresh analysis of Bacon’s De sapientia veterum –
previously considered to be a work of only literary interest – from the perspective of the historian and philosopher.
When Francesco Bacone dalla magia alla scienza was published in English
in 1968 it was hailed by Frances A. Yates as a work of groundbreaking importance.3 It had a broad and enduring impact, being translated into Spanish
1 Rome-Milan: Bocca Editori, 1952.
2 Bari: Laterza, 1957.
3 Francis Bacon. From magic to science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968).
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and Japanese, and reprinted in Italian in 1974 by Einaudi (Turin) and in
2004 by Il Mulino (Bologna). Francesco Bacone is justly considered to be
one of the most illuminating works on the English philosopher to be written in the twentieth century. It is not surprising therefore to find that The
Cambridge Companion to Bacon edited by Markku Peltonen opens with an
essay by Paolo Rossi on “Bacon’s idea of science.”4
Rossi’s reflections on the myriad dimensions of Bacon’s thought and on
the close relationship between magic and science during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries led to historical-cultural studies focusing in particular on advances in technology, in the tools and know-how of the craftsman
and the engineer in the early modern age, in other words on the scientific
revolution and the origins of modern science. This research would culminate in the publication of one of Rossi’s best known works, I filosofi e le
macchine: 1400-1700,5 in which he analyzed the new social and cultural perceptions of the mechanical arts. I filosofi was reprinted many times, and
translated into English, French, Spanish, Polish, Hungarian, Japanese and
many other languages.6 In it we find an intellectual approach to the history
of ideas combined with a profound interest in social history and the sociology of science.
In his study of the rise of modern science we can detect the influence of
Ernst Cassirer, Alexandre Koyré and Arthur O. Lovejoy, but also Edgard
Zilsel, Robert K. Merton, and Thomas S. Kuhn. In 2003 Rossi published an
essay entitled “Sulla scienza e gli strumenti: cinque divagazioni baconiane”7 in which he highlighted not only the importance of the Baconian tradition, but also the role of experimentation and technology in the scientific
revolution. In particular, he emphasized that in Koyré’s vision of modern
science there was no place for instruments and for the philosophies that
theorized their central importance.
His research on the genesis and framework of the scientific revolution,
and on the emergence of modern philosophy, prompted Rossi to reflect on
the ramifications of these new forms of knowledge and on the phenomenon of modernity. He studied such seminal figures as Giordano Bruno,
Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, but also less familiar but significant
authors like Francesco Patrizi and the Aristotelian school of Padua. This
4 “Bacon’s idea of science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, edited by Markku
Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 25-46.
5 Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962.
6 Philosophy, technology and the arts in the early modern era (New York: Harper and Row,
1970).
7 In Musa Musaei. Studies on Scientific Instruments and Collections in Honour of Mara
Miniati (Florence: Olschki, 2003), pp. 141-153.
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work would prove quite fruitful, leading to the publication of Aspetti della
rivoluzione scientifica8 of which an expanded edition, La scienza e la filosofia dei moderni, appeared in 1989.9 It would culminate in La nascita della
scienza moderna in Europa, which he wrote for the famous series “The
Making of Europe” edited by Jacques Le Goff.10
In the introduction to La nascita della scienza moderna Rossi laid out
some of the canons of his work as a historian of science. Scientific theories
constituted an element that could not be reduced to the socio-historical
conditions of a given period; that is, they were not a mere reflection of
these conditions. Our vision of history includes images of science that mark
the frontiers of knowledge; for the Renaissance this included criteria that
allow us to separate magic from science or the metaphysics from science,
and as we examine this history we discover alternatives, ideas that were
rejected, difficulties that were overcome, and the constant necessity to
choose in order to be able to define a particular scientific discipline or a
specific form of knowledge. Rossi demonstrated that continuism was a
reductionist and mediocre form of the philosophy of history superimposed
on the real version of history. For his entire career Rossi was a staunch
believer in the discontinuity of history, retaining that the scientific revolution and the early modern age constituted a genuine New Age and a radical
break with the past.
Paolo Rossi’s work was decisive in placing the question of magic and the
hermetic tradition on the agenda as factors in the birth of modern science,
although he never suggested that magic and science should be considered
on the same plane. In 1975 he warned of the risks of assigning too important
a role to the hermetic dimension in the reconstruction of the scientific revolution, although this did not imply a negation of the centrality of magic in
European culture between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rossi
regarded Paracelsus as an author of the first order, and noted that Newton’s
interest in alchemy and the hermetic tradition cast a salutary doubt on the
notion that the rise of modern science was a smooth and seamless process,
although the distinction between magical–alchemistic practices and modern scientific rationalism was clear in his mind. In the introduction to Il
tempo dei maghi. Rinascimento e modernità,11 which was the fruit of forty
years of study of Renaissance texts, Rossi noted the difficult path that the
pioneers of modern scientific knowledge had to forge.
8 Naples: Morano, 1971.
9 Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989.
10 Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1997.
11 Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2006.
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In his defense of modern rationalism and his critique of the vogue for
hermeticism and astrology, Rossi exposed the many forms of irrationalism
in post-modernist thought, the swings between an arcadian idealism that
mythified an imaginary past and the apocalyptic visions which tended to
characterize the philosophical and literary culture of twentieth-century
Italy. Rossi’s bibliography includes collections of essays – among them
Paragone degli ingegni moderni e postmoderni12 – which discuss the fallacy
of expedient but historically invalid images of modernity such as Martin
Heidegger’s attempts to nullify science and technology. Rossi always came
to the defense of scientific rationality. In one of his last books, Speranze,13
Rossi dismissed the diametrically opposed but equally irrational positions
of those who had abandoned all hope and those who clung blindly to hope,
in favour of a position based on the ‘reasonable hope’ that could save men
from a sense of impotence and desperation.
Rossi described himself first and foremost as a historian of ideas; by formation, profession and inclination he was a historian of philosophy, but he
always viewed the history of science as part of the intellectual history of
mankind. Many of his collections of essays, such as Il passato, la memoria,
l’oblio,14 which was awarded the Premio Viareggio 1992 for non-fiction;
Naufragi senza spettatore, on the theme of progress;15 and Bambini, sogni,
furori,16 include reflections on the history of ideas. While mindful of the
limits of Lovejoy’s theories, Rossi would always regard the North American
school as offering a valuable model for the renewal of the Italian approach
to philosophical historiography, which was trammeled by the legacy of its
idealistic tradition. In Storia e filosofia17 he adopted the perspective of a
historian of ideas, but the book was permeated with an awareness of the
close ties between the history of philosophy, the history of ideas, and the
history of science, and the necessity for philosophers and historians of philosophy to renounce all claims of hegemony and the notion of the omnipotence of history or of theory.
In 1988 Rossi drew attention to what was a new development in the field
of historiography in Italy: the broadening of the themes being chosen for
historical-philosophical reconstruction, and in particular the growing
interest in the history of scientific thought and the history of science, which
12 Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989.
13 Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008.
14 Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991.
15 Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995.
16 Milan: Feltrinelli, 2001.
17 Turin: Einaudi, 1969 (republished in an expanded edition in 1975).
F. Abbri / Nuncius 27 (2012) 1–10
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were constant threads running through Italian culture. His essay “Filosofia
e storia della filosofia” written for the reference work Filosofia which he had
been invited to edit,18 and his book Un altro presente. Dieci saggi sulla storia
della filosofia reflect his now consolidated approach to the history of philosophy, which he considered to be inseparable from the history of ideas
and contiguous to the history of science and of scientific thought.19
In 1986 Rossi published I ragni e le formiche. Un’apologia della storia della
scienza20 in which he defended the study of the history of science, countering the epistemologists’ interpretation of the history of science as a straightforward series of events or chapters with his own historical reconstruction
based on decades of research and a careful re-reading of original sources.
Through works such as I ragni e le formiche, through his teaching and
research, his interviews and participation in other scholarly activities, Rossi
contributed to raise awareness in academic and institutional circles of the
importance of the study of the history of science, which represented
the history of a unique, but difficult and fragile conquest, that is, of science.
He defended the historiography of science as an autonomous discipline,
one that was of particular importance in Italy, which could boast such pioneering scholars as Aldo Mieli and Federigo Enriques, who could do little
however to favour its institutionalization during the first half of the twentieth century. The monumental Storia della scienza moderna e contemporanea edited by Rossi helped to consolidate the position of the history of
science in Italian scholarship.21
In I ragni e le formiche Rossi retraced the overarching themes of his historical research, which ranged from the study of the relationship between
magic and science to the origins of the scientific revolution and the evolution in ideologies and philosophies that followed the technical revolu
tion. Alongside these themes, two figures accompanied him throughout his
life – Sir Francis Bacon, but also another great and beloved philosopher,
Giambattista Vico, the author of Scienza Nuova.
In 1960 Rossi published Clavis universalis. Arti della memoria e logica combinatoria da Lullo a Leibniz, whose themes were the centrality of classical
art of memory in the culture of Europe and the idea of a perfect universal
language, which had been elaborated between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with important philosophical implications for forms of
18 In La filosofia, edited by Paolo Rossi (Turin: UTET, 1995), Vol. II, pp. 455-499.
19 Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999.
20 Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986.
21 Turin: UTET, 1988.
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knowledge and reality.22 This groundbreaking volume, which preceded
Frances Yates’ classic work The Art of Memory (1966),23 was reprinted in a
revised edition in 1983 by Il Mulino – a ‘restored fossil’ as Rossi wrote with
characteristic modesty and humour in the copy that he presented to me at
the time. Rossi dedicated the second edition to Yates, who had immediately
recognized and acknowledged the importance in the first edition of his
research on combinatory logic and on the art of memory. Clavis universalis
was translated into Japanese, French and English and was widely read,
being considered to be a genuine milestone on a topic that only afterwards
gained broad acceptance among historiographers. Memory was a perennial
theme in Rossi’s work and, in recognition of his historical and philosophical
studies on the mind and memory, the Società Psicanalitica Italiana conferred upon him the Premio Musatti in 2008.
Rossi devoted much time to the study of the eighteenth-century jurist
and political philosopher Giambattista Vico, publishing works that included
a volume of essays entitled Le sterminate antichità.24 A more extensive
edition published by La Nuova Italia would bring together forty years of
research on Vico.25 In the face of the generally accepted interpretations of
Vico’s work and philosophy, Rossi affirmed his stature but offered a fresh
evaluation of his philosophy within the context of the culture of his particular time and place. This interpretation of Vico sparked off a storm of
controversy among Italian scholars, but contributed to change the perception and demonstrate the contemporary relevance of his philosophy.
The new discipline of history as defined by Vico figured prominently in
I segni del tempo. Storia della Terra e storia delle nazioni da Hooke a Vico,26 a
work in which Rossi explored the history of geology and the temporal
dimension of the history of man, together with questions of language, in
order to reconstruct the discovery of time in a context in which naturalists,
cosmologists, geologists, philosophers and scholars all interacted during
the early modern age. I segni del tempo reflected Rossi’s ability to orient
himself in very different fields, from the history of the Earth to the history of
nations, as he analyzed the shifting perceptions and interpretations of the
past. I segni del tempo was extremely influential and the English edition,
22 Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960.
23 Francis Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
24 Le sterminate antichità. Studi vichiani (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1969).
25 Le sterminate antichità e nuovi saggi vichiani (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1999).
26 I segni del tempo. Storia della Terra e storia delle nazioni da Hooke a Vico (Milan:
Feltrinelli, 1979).
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which appeared in 1984, was well received, particularly among historians of
science and historians of geology.27
In 1985 the American History of Science Society conferred on Paolo Rossi
the Sarton Medal for his contributions to the history of science. In his presentation speech, Charles B. Schmitt captured Rossi’s balanced scholarly
approach, noting that he had opened the way for research into the hermetic tradition, but was one of the first to disassociate himself “[…] from
some of the more bizarre directions in which the enthusiasts were moving.”28 In 2002 the Société de Physique et d’Histoire Naturelle of Geneva
bestowed on Rossi the Marc-August Pictet Prize, and in 2009 he was
awarded the Prix Balzan in the history of science.
Paolo Rossi was a member of the Academia Europaea and the Accademia
Nazionale dei Lincei. He served as president of the Società Filosofica
Italiana from 1980 to 1983 and was one of the founding members and the
first president (1983-1990) of the Società Italiana di Storia della Scienza.
Rossi collaborated frequently with institutes of research on the history
and the philosophy of science, including the Domus Galilaeana in Pisa, the
Centro Fiorentino di Storia e Filosofia della Scienza, and the Istituto e
Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence (now the Museo Galileo). His
links with the Museo Galileo were extremely close, and date back to when
the museum was under the directorship of Maria Luisa Righini Bonelli. He
served as a member of the museum’s Comitato Scientifico and from 1986 on
the International Editorial Board of the journal Nuncius. Just a few years
ago Rossi decided to donate his valuable private collection of books on the
history of science and related archival material to the museum on his death.
Rossi was a formidable scholar – painstaking and severe – but at the
same time he was warm and cordial, and eternally interested in the professional and personal growth of his former students. The influence of his
example and his teaching is testified to by the large number of students
who have gone on to become distinguished scholars in various subjects
pertaining to the history of philosophy and the history of science. The recognition that he earned both in Italy and abroad can be measured in the
many Festschriften that appeared in his honour. In 1990 Stefano Poggi and
Massimo Mugnai published a collection of essays – Tradizioni filosofiche e
mutamenti scientifici – to mark the occasion of Paolo Rossi’s sixty-fifth
27 The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke
to Vico, translated by Lydia Cochrane (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).
28 Annali dell’Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, 1985, 10/2, p. 138.
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birthday.29 In 1995 Antonello La Vergata and Alessandro Pagnini edited a
volume in his honour entitled Storia della Filosofia, Storia della Scienza to
which former students and also such distinguished colleagues as William
R. Shea, Yehuda Elkana, Paul K. Feyerabend, Ian Hacking, Larry Laudan,
Nicholas Jardine and George S. Rousseau contributed essays.30 In 2000
Ferdinando Abbri and Marco Segala edited a book of essays by some of
Rossi’s younger ex-students, which also contained a bibliography of Rossi’s
works updated to 1999.31 In 2007 John L. Heilbron produced a volume in
collaboration with the Museo Galileo and published by Leo S. Olschki, entitled Advancements of Learning, to which some of the most eminent historians of science in Europe and North America contributed.32
In 1986 I had the signal honour of being invited by Rossi to co-author an
editorial on “The History of Science in Italy” for Isis.33 At the time I still
thought of my former maestro as “Professor Rossi,” but he eventually
became “Paolo” and over the course of forty years I had the privilege of
spending much time in his company and I never ceased to learn from him.
I know that I, along with many others, will miss him deeply for his sage
advice, his percipient critical observations, and his profound humanity.
Through his writings, his teaching, and his generous participation in the
activities of the scholarly community he contributed in countless ways to
the advancement of studies in the history of philosophy and the history of
science during the second half of the twentieth century.
29 Massimo Mugnai, Stefano Poggi (eds.), Tradizioni filosofiche e mutamenti scientifici
(Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990).
30 Antonello La Vergata, Alessandro Pagnini (eds.), Storia della Filosofia, Storia della
Scienza. Saggi in onore di Paolo Rossi (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1995).
31 Ferdinando Abbri, Marco Segala (eds.), Segni e percorsi della modernità. Saggi in onore
di Paolo Rossi (Arezzo: Università degli Studi di Siena, 2000).
32 John L. Heilbron (ed.), Advancements of Learning. Essays in Honour of Paolo Rossi
(Florence: Olschki, 2007).
33 Isis, 1986, 77: 213-218.

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